Melissa Weber is in her element — headphones hugging her ears,
an old record spinning under her hands — but she isn't smiling.
She isn't exactly frowning, either. The scrunched face she's making
right now, sitting in the corner of the Domino Sound Record Shack, is
somewhere in between, like she just caught a whiff of someone nearby
breaking wind. Given the wedgelike confines of the 7th Ward vinyl
repository, she very well could have. But no, Weber assures me: It's
the LP.

"I'm very quick; I know instantly," the woman better
known as DJ Soul Sister had bragged as she walked into Domino for her
weekly survey of new (old) releases. And the preceding samples had
proved her right: yay on Parliament's 1975 Nagin-favorite Chocolate
City ("This one I have, but my copy is wretched"); nay on Chubby
Checker's 1971 psychedelic detour Chequered! ("He's just, like,
forcing it"). Weber's final find, however, has left her befuddled.

"This is sort of ... odd," she says, handing over the
cans. "And it's got a big camel on it." She holds up the album. Sure
enough, the cover art for Abu Haf'la Orchestra's Wanna Buy a
Camel?, a 1978 approximation of an Israeli Soul Train, is a
close-up of a stylized Joe Camel in desert headgear and aviator shades.
He is smiling.

"The last record I bought with a camel on it was the
bomb, so I'm not sleeping on the camel," she adds, repossessing the
headphones. "This is straight-up Middle Eastern disco! I don't know how
I feel about that. I have to keep listening."

The scrunched face returns, followed by a series of tiny
gasps and sighs. "Oh, this is weeeird. Oh my God, OK. Now listen
to this. I like it, but it's making me a little uncomfortable. Any
record that wants to make its way in, it has to be easy. Right now, for
me, is one song good enough to warrant a space in my house and $18?
It's zany. I like it and I can't stand it, all at the same time."

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After one more song, a verdict: Weber wants to buy the
camel. "I can't leave this here," she tells the clerk. "It's too
ridiculous for me to not have."

Record hunting with DJ Soul Sister is akin to making groceries with
Alton Brown. It's part anthropology lesson, part archaeological
excavation. There is no shopping list, only a breathless thumbing
through dozens of dusty crates and a primer on funk/soul brothers
Chicago Gangsters and T.U.M.E. On this day, we'll visit Domino and the
Louisiana Music Factory, and the radio DJ, dance party-starter and
world-renowned Queen of Rare Grooves will add six new (old) records to
her collection.

"I never have a list," Weber explains early on at
Domino. "I just look at everything. For instance, this ..." She holds
up the Gangsters' Gangster Love (1976), whose cover is a
red-hued image of a pity-no-fools nude woman covering her breasts with
a .45 pistol. "Nine times out of 10 it's a better possibility for
success. You don't know what you're going to get. But if it's cheap
enough, I'll take a chance. I'll probably buy this." (She did.)

For more than five years, Weber, 34, has turned weekend
nights in New Orleans into a three-pronged showcase for her prodigious
archive of rare and out-of-print records. Every Saturday starts a music
marathon: At 8 p.m., she settles into the WWOZ booth for "Soul Power,"
her deep funk and rare groove radio program, among the first and now
longest-running such shows in the country. Afterward, at 10 p.m., she
lugs four crates up the stairs at Mimi's in the Marigny, sets up her
turntables, and from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. spins the most incendiary album
cuts she can unearth. Later on Sunday, she returns at 10 p.m. for a
relaxed comedown that bleeds into Monday at 1 a.m.

While all three gigs focus on the unfamiliar, each has
its own direction. "On 'OZ, because it's rare groove, I'll play
Brazilian stuff, I'll play some jazz," Weber says. "[Saturday at
Mimi's] is straight-up for the dance floor, and as wild as I can get
it. It's the power of the music and the vibe of the space. ... Sunday
is the opposite of Saturday. Sunday is really mellow and laidback, and
Saturday, people are dancing on the tables."

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Her first gig, "Soul Power" started in 1994 as a
continuation of Nita Ketner's "Soul Show." Weber joined the station as
a Loyola freshman intern. "I just wanted to help out and lick
envelopes," she says. "I never had any want to be on the air. Back
then, you couldn't even talk about wanting to be on the air unless you
knew some stuff about music. Here I am, 18 years old. It's like, who is
this child? I knew I had to step it up and do everything bigger and
better, just to show that I was deep into the music and not just there
for fun and games."

The original midnight time slot was ideal for indulging
her love of subsurface soul and funk. In the beginning, Weber says, it
felt like she was shouting into the void. "I didn't know if anyone was
listening at all. I just wanted to do a good job filling in, taking
over Nita's show."

"Soul Power" picked up where the rarer end of "The Soul
Show" left off. Weber, a regular listener of the latter, remembers
calling in to Ketner during a spin of a James Brown production, "Super
Good" by Myra Barnes. "We all know James Brown. Then, here's a
woman singing in the James Brown style. Nita would play 'Bold
Soul Sister' by Ike and Tina Turner, which I made my theme song."

Now a popularized tag used by collectors to describe all
stripes of vintage funk and soul records, "rare groove" was foreign to
Weber the first time she heard it. She says an early caller —
from Europe, no less — introduced her to the term, and awarded
her a royal handle that took. "[He] said, 'You're the queen of rare
groove!' I said, 'What is that?' He said, 'The stuff that you play!'
This guy says I'm one of the only women he's heard playing it. And
definitely one of the only radio shows playing it regularly.

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"That's where I got that name from," she beams. "The
Queen of Rare Groove."

Londoner Norman Jay is credited with coining "rare
grooves" — his "Original Rare Groove Show" dates back to 1986
— but there's only ever been one Queen. Her take on the
DJ-appropriated genre over which she reigns:

"Rare groove is sort of this subcategory, this catch-all
term for funky music. It doesn't even have to be funky: soulful music,
stuff that was not a hit. I grew up listening to funk music on local
radio stations, WYLD-FM, WAIL-FM. All the jams that everybody was
partying to. I just loved it so much and wanted to hear more. I don't
think I heard of rare groove and decided to be into it; I think I was
always into album cuts."

Weber's first LP was by Kool & the Gang, but
appropriately enough, it wasn't a disco-era hit factory like Ladies'
Night (1979) or Celebrate! (1980); rather, it was 1972's
relatively unheralded Music Is the Message. Weber was 6 years
old.

"From when I was little, it was always about the funk
for me, all the time," she says. "My dad liked a lot of music, but he
was not into the funk per se; he just liked records. He would listen to
all sorts of things, but he wouldn't take care of his records. I'd walk
through the house and see a drink on top of a record, as a coaster. It
made me crazy! Maybe that's why I got into collecting. When he wasn't
looking, I'd take his records, I'd clean them off and I'd put them in
my room."

Asked about the size of that collection today, she
simply replies, "Thousands." Where some keep their alphabetized horde
on lockdown, Weber's is a working library: "Someone once said, 'The
collection is for archival purposes.' I'm always using records,
listening to them at home."

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Mid-hunt at the Louisiana Music Factory, stuck at the listening
station behind a guy with a foot-high stack of jazz platters ("Looks
like an experienced digger over here"), DJ Soul Sister reflects on some
highlights of her crate-digging obsession. She sheepishly admits to
having paid $300 for a single 45: "Ain't No Need," a slinky soul
obscurity by the crooner Skye, the result of a "Buy It Now" impulse
purchase on eBay. "Which is dangerous," she adds, "because I can be up
in the middle of the night, like, 'Let's see what's going on.'"

The one that got away: 1976's Introducing Roger
by Roger & the Human Body. "I was at a UNO record fair — the
Lakefront Arena was just full of books and records. When you go
digging, you look through every [box]. I literally went through a box
full of Carpenters and Neil Diamond records. And smack in the middle of
this box was [Introducing Roger]. The significance of this
record is that it's an early record by Roger Troutman, who was the
leader of Zapp. It was on his own label, Troutman Brothers Records, and
I bought it for a buck. It was clean mint, so incredibly rare. I wound
up selling it a couple years later in Germany for $200. Now you get it
on eBay for at least $1,000. I wish I had it, because Roger Troutman
was shot to death a few years later. And I like the record."

After 15 years on the air, Weber's musical education is
ongoing. Currently, she says, she's researching New Orleans disco
culture. "There's this thing about the word 'disco.' No one really
understands what that is, but it's fun to say that you hate it. All the
word 'discotheque' meant was, a place that people went to dance to
people playing records. The earliest discos were in the early '70s, and
the disco classics were not the oversaturated stuff you see with John
Travolta and all of that — it was soul music, hardcore soul and
funk music like "Soul Makossa" by Manu Dibango. Then you have the
technology of the disco. Without disco, you would not have a 12-inch
single. The mixer with the crossfader — you wouldn't have hip-hop
without either of those.

"There's this thing in the rare groove community," she
continues, "this saying that nothing good was recorded after 1975.
Which to me is the most stupid thing I've ever heard in my life. And
also a little bigoted, in a sort of odd way."

While she's talking, records interrupt her periodically
from the bins. A mint Music Is the Message: "Oh, what? This is
an original for $12? This is my favorite album of all time! I already
have it, but it's kind of very sentimental to me. To find a clean
original like this, I just have to have another copy." Brides of
Funkenstein's Funk or Walk (1978): "I found out my cousin (Dawn
Silva) was in this band! I already have it, but I want it for the
legs." (The cover, a rendering of two space-age babes in provocative
lockstep, is typically obscured by a sticker.)

"Besides," the Queen of Rare Groove reasons, heading to
the checkout counter with her booty, "you can never have too many
copies of Funk or Walk."